Will Petraeus Rein In the Drone War?

When Gen. David Petraeus takes off his uniform and heads to the CIA, he’ll put “relentless pressure” against al-Qaida, Petraeus told senators on Thursday. But in a rare public discussion of the CIA’s premiere program to keep that pressure on — the drone war — Petraeus suggested it’s not his first counterterrorism option.

Petraeus and his questioner, Sen. Roy Blunt, had to dance around the classified program, which former CIA Director Leon Panetta discussed mostly by euphemism. But citing his military experience, he told the Senate intelligence committee that he’d prefer to capture terrorists than blast them with Hellfire missiles from flying robots.

That way, “you can indeed interrogate them, develop knowledge about them, the organizations they’re part of, build, if you will, the link diagrams, occupational charts, [and] understand the hierarchy,” Petraeus said. That might augur a renewed CIA role in terrorist interrogations — which led to one of the agency’s most damaging controversies, with torture in secret CIA prisons.

Or maybe it’s just talk for the Congresscritters. After all, Petraeus quadrupled airstrikes once he took over the Iraq war. And in Afghanistan, with Petraeus in charge, death from above rains down like never before: November alone saw 850 air strikes, triple the strike sorties flown the previous November, before Petraeus arrived. He even answered President Karzai’s complaints about air raids with a slight uptick in the air campaign. So an enthusiasm for air-to-ground missiles is well in character.

If it’s not possible to take someone alive, “kinetic activity is an option,” Petraeus continued, “whether with drones or another kinetic element.” (Military commanders like the word “kinetic” instead of “violent.”)

“The experience of the military with unmanned aerial vehicles is that the precision is quite impressive,” Petraeus continued. “There is a very low incident of civilian casualties in such operations… a proliferation of various platforms allow us observation and understanding of the targets before they’re attacked.”

But Petraeus doesn’t want to draw the CIA “into a game of whack-a-mole,” which as a military commander he once considered a losing proposition — before touting body counts in Afghanistan as a measure of progress. “We have to whack all the moles simultaneously.”

To that end, Petraeus echoed Leon Panetta, the new secretary of defense, in a pledge to continue “the superb cooperation” between the CIA and “the Joint Special Operations Command and other military commands.” Covert operations are “enormously important,” he said.

Petraeus didn’t say too much about the drone campaign, and it would be tendentious to read too much into those remarks. But it’s the closest a top intelligence official — or would-be intelligence official — has come to saying that the drones might not be the premiere counterterrorism tool at the CIA’s disposal anymore.

Meanwhile, once Petraeus is confirmed, the CIA gains an exceptional potent political asset — for drones, covert action, whatever. Senators from Dianne Feinstein to Joe Lieberman lined up to give Petraeus a greeting more appropriate for a Turkish harem than a congressional hearing. The panel’s vice chairman, Sen. Saxby Chambliss, said that he believes the best course in Afghanistan is “whatever Gen. Petraeus says.” Judging from that, the agency under Petraeus could miss signs of an impending alien invasion and Congress wouldn’t dare utter a word of criticism.